Skeletons
by RapunzelK
Summary: Everybody has one or two in their closet. Karl has over 300.
1. Chapter 1

03/01/06

Skeletons

One

He slept with his glasses on, that way, if he woke up from what fragile sleep he'd managed to grasp, he wouldn't accidentally look through the walls or the floor. The skeletons in these closets were far too literal for his taste. Only those thick lenses and his own hands or arm seemed to do anything to block his vision. Too often, even that was not enough to drive the images from his mind's eye, or the slippery, sticky feeling of blood that lingered on his hands.

The occupational hazards of having X-ray vision were many. Chief among them was accidentally seeing things you were not supposed to see and often did not want to see. After almost seven years of unintentional peeping- two of which had been spent in college- Karl had developed a certain tolerance for sights strange and disturbing. His glasses had since cut down his accidental spying. As long as he wore them his vision was as limited as that of any other mortal man, but without them, walls and floors disappeared, allowing him to see through and into objects. He'd learned to ignore the custodians, their forms no longer invisible behind walls and floors of wood and brick, as they made their rounds in the night, scrubbing floors and emptying dustbins above and below him while others slept. Tuning out the all-too visible amorous exploits of the couple in the next room had taken a bit more practice but he'd eventually prevailed. However, every time the drunk downstairs came home to his wife in a temper, Karl always wondered if he should intervene (a solution was duly reached by intercepting the downstairs tenant before he even walked in the front door). All those things Karl would gladly take back if only to be away from this.

There was nowhere to hide from it. He was being…well, not paid…but was expected to show up dressed, pressed and smiling, ready and waiting to tell the taller men in white coats what had gone wrong. Karl had never considered himself an actor, but every second of every day had so far been forcibly wrenched into an award-winning performance. No thanks to the academy. This was one aspect of bedside manner he'd never been taught. He would not have wished it on anyone. Two weeks here and he had already seen enough to last him several thousand lifetimes. He'd learned the first night not to remove his glasses for a second, not even to sleep or bathe. Seeing things at their outermost was bad enough, looking deeper was infinitely worse.

The prisoners- as Karl thought of them- were not kept in the officer's or medical staff's barracks. At least, they were not housed inside the same complex. The men were stabled in crude wooden huts surrounded by a high fence topped by concertina wire about a hundred yards from the "medical" complex. The women were kept in identical structures at the opposite end of the camp. There were few children, for that he was grateful. He and the other "doctors" and staff members were housed in a comparatively pleasant if Spartan building of concrete in the center. It was at least clean, but that didn't matter much to Karl. At the moment he would have paid dearly to be huddling in a muddy fox hole. Bullets and mines made sense, in a way. The attack was open and honest. This…this was wrong. It made no sense. There was no REASON for any of this to be happening and yet here he was, thrust right in the middle of it, with corpses surrounding him on every side.

Some of the corpses lived yet, they moaned down in the cold basement locker, choking on their own fluids as they slowly, painfully dragged towards death. Those were the "successful" ones to be brought out and tortured a second time. This wasn't science, this was butchery. There was no medical foundation for any of this nonsense. But it was not his place to say. All he could do was keep his mouth shut and observe, otherwise he might be next. He felt like a coward for thinking like that. He should have said "no", been shot, and been done with it. But he'd been too stunned to speak and so had been hauled off by his collar to join the German army. Which was the greater sin? To remain silent and stay alive, or to confess and die horribly with the other prisoners, honor intact? He supposed it didn't matter since he could never bring himself to open his mouth. He was simply too afraid. He would have felt ashamed but the fear left no room for anything except horror.

His powers, while desperate to keep them secret, were the only thing keeping him alive and off the examination table himself. Originally shanghaied for a field medic he now found himself serving as part of the medical staff at i _Buchenwald_ /i . Beech Forest indeed. The once noble patch of trees and quaint homes had been leveled by bombs and the heavy boots of invading troops. Now a sprawling camp of mud and concrete took up the space where pleasant things had once lived. If this was the forest then he and the other men were bears, waiting to devour the souls of the hapless prisoners who had not run fast enough.

The one mercy he'd been granted was that he had not had to administer any of the treatments. He'd managed to beg off and hand over or back out of it one way or another until the higher-ups had become accustomed to him serving as diagnostic staff only. It was bad enough having to watch. Karl refused in his heart if not with his mouth to raise a hand in such away against another human being. Instead he did his best to clean up the mess the others made.

They sent them to him, men, women, children, all of them ravaged and mutilated in one way or another. Shaved, naked, even in the dead of winter. He fought for what little comforts he could provide under the excuse of sanitation and science. Were not test subjects to be taken care of? Apparently this was not a major concern to those running things. Still, he managed to get his way in a few things; towels for modesty, paper for the examination tables, alcohol for clean up, and other small niceties that would be dismissed without thought or care. The staff didn't seem to notice. He hoped it made a difference to his patients. He had nothing else to give them.


	2. Chapter 2

03/02/06

Skeletons

Two

The first to remember him was a woman. She was a little older then he, perhaps mid-thirties, early forties. Undressed and shivering on the floor- whether from pain or cold he could not tell- her crossed arms did not quite disguise the evidence that she had been a mother at least once. He was not told her name, only her number. He asked it anyway, softly, guarded, afraid of who might be listening and tried to help her up.

She did not respond at first. Her vision ruined, thick navy tears streaming down her cheeks, she could only wonder at his light touch and the smallness of his hands. She had expected fingers long and grabbing like the talons of a hawk. Instead the hand gently grasping her arm and hoisting her to her feet seemed to be that of a child.

She was strong enough to sit herself on the examination table for which he was grateful. She might have been feather-light and while Karl possessed unusual strength for a man so small, she was simply too big for him to lift alone. She seemed surprised at the thin, waxy strip of paper separating her from the stained wood and more so at the flimsy towel he draped over her shoulders. He tried to coax her to talk. If she could keep her mind on something else she wouldn't pay as much attention to her pain.

Her name was Hannah, Hannah Ulrecht. She was thirty-four and had two children, the elder was ten, the younger seven. She'd no idea what had become of them but hoped they were safe. He listened carefully, encouraging to go on about her oldest daughter's misadventures in learning to ride a bicycle, their family fishing trip, and new automobile. She was crying again until she finished, but it had done her good to recall more pleasant times. He had cleaned the ink from her face, scruffed some delousing powder through her sparse hair and done what he could for her. It wasn't much. He patted her shoulder gently as she got to her feet, two soldiers entering to drag her back to the stables. That's all she was to them, an animal, a bitch, something to be thrown crumbs when she behaved and kicked if she didn't.

He would see her twice more. The last time he would watch her die, starved and stabbed with needle marks, already half-devoured by parasites and disease. The body died first here, trapping the spirit in a crumbling, pillaged casket of slowly rotting flesh. There was hardly enough to bury, decay had set in long before she perished. So little of her was left she could have easily been folded up into an ossuary. They did that, she'd told him, because like him they believed they would some day rise from their graves when the Lord returned for them. Cremation was the final insult. As Karl watch her ashes rise from the smoke stack and drift away on the wind, he cried. It was only the smoke in the wind, he said. His eyes were very sensitive.

Karl learned to blame a lot of things on sensitivity. The staff laughed at his almost hypochondriac tendencies and his apparent mortal horror of germs. No one had thought of latex gloves yet but he insisted on soap and alcohol, ammonia, delousing powder, clean towels, paper, and anything else he could wheedle out of the supply closet. They scolded him for wasting good equipment on "the Jews". He insisted stoutly that he would not examine patients who were contaminated. After all, would not disease and lice adversely affect the results of the experiments? They laughed at him but let him have his way, patting him on the head as if he were a child of seven. He hardly noticed. There was more at stake than his dignity.

They sent him others, countless others. He tried to show them what dignity he could, sending them back at the very least cleaner than they'd started and with a good drink of water. He dared not try to sneak them food. Some he saw only once, they either died on the table, in the stables, or by the hand of someone else. Others he saw two or three times, the strongest as many as five or six. "They ask for you, you know," one of the other doctors had told him once. "'Let me see the Little Doctor' they say. You're spoiling them, Von Straussen. You needn't waste courtesy and delousing powder on chattel."

"The delousing powder is for me," Karl had lied. "I do not want anything jumping into my hair."

The taller man had laughed as if hearing the most wonderful joke in the world. "How did you survive the fox holes, Shorty?"

"Why do you think I'm paranoid of lice?"

He laughed again and was still laughing as he turned and walked away down the hall. Karl watched him leave, a false smile on his face and a sick feeling in his stomach.


	3. Chapter 3

03/02/06

Skeletons

Three

They sent him a man next, an older fellow nearing sixty. He'd been working hard to prove his worth that they might not kill him. His bones were riddled with stress cracks, becoming bent and soft from the dual punishment of malnutrition and hard labor. He knew as well as Karl that it didn't matter. In the end, he would die and be burned like all the others. Still, they were both determined to put it off as long as possible.

Karl did his best, but the damage had been done and the man- Isaac Günter- was already badly infected. Anyone with at least one biology class under their belt knew that a human could not stand water much hotter than eighty degrees, that was why there were safety valves on boilers and water heaters in homes. There was no reason why this should be methodically tested on half a dozen people. He couldn't offer bandages or even salve, only empty words, vague and disguised for fear someone should be listening.

Isaac didn't want to talk about his family, instead he spoke about dignity, basic rights as a human being. In his heart, Karl agreed with every word he said. This was no way to treat people. No one should be subject to this. Even criminals were given better treatment than this. He couldn't say a word, not without giving himself away. He had to send him back only half-tended. The infection spread and he died the next day. Karl caught a glimpse of his body as the undertakers dragged it away to finish the job.

He didn't understand how everyone else could sleep at night. Surely not all of them were convinced these people were no more than animals, livestock to be bred or slaughtered as they saw fit. Didn't they find the sight of animated skeletons unsettling? Didn't the rancid odor of human waste and sweat from the stables and the acrid, choking stench of burning flesh from the crematoriums sting their eyes and make them gag? Did they not hear the howls and shrieks from the clinic, the moans and puking from those marked as unsuccessful experiments? Karl decided they must all be blind and deaf, rendered utterly senseless by the mindless carnage around them. They had to be. How else could they go along calmly while all this went on at every side? But then, they could shut it out by closing the door, by pulling the blind, by simply turning away.

Karl didn't have that luxury. He discovered that the first night he hesitantly removed his glasses before going to sleep. He put them on again immediately. He hadn't known his room was directly above one of the holding tanks, nor had he wanted to know that the officer in the room next to his was being entertained by one of the little Jewish girls, still pretty despite her nearly bald head. If the prisoners were animals then the staff evidently had no qualms against bestiality. Through the invisible walls he could see people and objects, some healthy some not so much. Someone was tanning skins in one of the outbuildings. Karl shuddered and fought the urge to be sick, noting the hides were the wrong size and shape to have belonged to quadrupeds. Shoving his glasses back into place he dove into bed and cowered under the covers, trying hard to block out what was going on around him. His stomach twisted and wrenched, imploring but he ignored it, forcing the choking sensation down. He wanted to vomit but the thought of venturing out into the corridor chilled him more. He thought about crying but someone might hear. Worse still, tears would leave salt spots on his lenses and that would necessitate removing them in order to get them clean. That he would not do. Trapped inside this haunted house full of the living dead, a grisly surprise hidden in every corner, Karl decided he wanted to see no more than strictly necessary. His glasses would stay on no matter what.

He didn't sleep that night. If he did sleep, he didn't remember and it certainly didn't feel like he had. The anxiety just kept steadily climbing from that point on. It had taken him months to drive the image of the next door neighbors in the far away university boarding house in Dessau making love from his head. He had a feeling that this would be branded into his mind forever.

He would add to that catalogue of images over the weeks he spent there. In terms of plain and simple hours and minutes he only spent a little under two months at i _Buchenwald_ /i but it felt like an eternity. It seemed every five minutes a new horror, an assault to eyes and mind and heart, was being thrust upon him. The administrators would ask him what had gone wrong as if ignorant of what they had done, as if it were not perfectly obvious. He began to wonder if he was not in fact stranded in an asylum and he the only sane one of the lot, unless of course i _he_ /i was the one losing his mind. He was, but not quite in the same way. Day by day he could feel his resolve slipping, his sanity gradually eroding under so much abuse. Surely he'd crack soon. They'd find him out and he'd be the next rat to be flayed and molested, his insides stirred with a stick and his hair burned away in quack attempts to permanently dye it blonde. He'd be spared the dye needle. His eyes were already blue.

"Mengele would love you," they told him. "Clever and a dwarf to boot! Who knew someone so little could be so smart!"

Karl was not exactly encouraged by this. Mengele, mercifully, was hundreds of miles away butchering people in Poland. Twins and dwarves were widely rumored as Mengele 's favorites. He collected them the way the officers collected cigarette cards and pin-up posters. Twins, particularly identical twins, fascinated him. They provided the perfect, natural example of both specimen and control. One he would experiment on while the other would be left alone for a time. In the end, both always died. The dwarves he treated as pets or toys rather than people, but did not experiment on them. Instead he took them in and cared for them, unintentionally saving many who would have otherwise been exterminated for their "deformity". To Karl it proved that somehow God would manage to wring something good out of a madman's strange desires. He wondered what good could possibly be wrenched out of i _Buchenwald_ /i ?

Karl himself stood just one inch under four-feet tall. Because of his brilliance and medical skill he had been allowed to live, but for how long he was not sure. He really had no desire to be added to Mengele's half-pint menagerie though it might prolong his miserable life. He never actually considered turning his scalpel on himself, though he had some of the more considerate staff ask about him. Food did not excite him, no more did anything else. Though he did his best to hide it, it was obvious that life at the camp was not agreeing with him. He smiled and joked about a delicate stomach and nervousness about being stepped on. They laughed and smiled and patted him on the head and forgot all about it. It was harder for Karl to forget. He didn't notice the gray hairs appearing amid the dark ones, or the thinness of his face. It was difficult to ignore his insides, however. The constant knot in his stomach made it difficult to eat and the ghosts of what he had seen that day kept him awake at night. He didn't mind sitting up with them. Reliving the scenes in the horrible, graphic detail of his dreams was far worse. He wondered sometimes if he was not already dreaming and this was just a nightmare from which he would soon awake. Other times he wished he could fall asleep and not wake up. Then if they decided to slice him down the middle he wouldn't be awake to notice it.


	4. Chapter 4

03/02/06

Skeletons

Four

It was the twins that did him in. The poor little things, so thin and tiny, hardly a hair's breath taller than he was himself, their chestnut curls only beginning to recover from being shaved to the scalp. The were eight-and-a-half years old each. (Halves were very important when reckoning ages under thirteen.) Karl had the feeling they would have been joined at the hip before this, but there really had been no need to render the expression literal. The girls had been flayed and then stitched together starting at the hip and continuing all the way down to the ankle, forcing them to walk as if in a perpetual three-legged race. They'd pulled the stitches, there was really no way to avoid doing so, what with being eight-and-a-half and patched together like a flour sack dress.

It wasn't hard to separate them. They didn't cry much as he clipped the stitches and gently peeled them apart. Each held an end of the towel over themselves as little salty drops fell from their soft brown eyes as they talked to him about how they missed their mama, and their sister, and their dog Shortcake, and their dolls. He told them they were very brave and wished he had a lollipop to give to each of them, though peroxide would have been better. Each girl's leg had become badly infected. There was little hope for either girl. He risked some raised eyebrows and sacrificed a roll of bandages in order to shield their raw flesh from the mud outside and the pathogens it carried. It would do absolutely no good. The girls legs eventually had to be amputated, but that was not the worst of it. The head surgeon ("butcher" was a better term in Karl's opinion) would be repeating an attempt to conjoin the girls by stitching the stumps of their legs together. All medical staff members were supposed to observe this momentous leap of medical science and Karl, his genius with a scalpel widely known, was supposed to help.

He lasted about five minutes into the surgery. The sheer ludicrousy of the operation coupled with the fact that it was actually going to be performed was appalling. Especially since neither of the girls had been drugged beforehand. If they lay limp and unflinching on the table it was because they were too exhausted and ill to do otherwise. His vision swam, the room spun and everything went black. Karl had rather hoped the blackness might last a while but he awoke all too soon, his brain forced to restart by the reek of smelling salts. He jerked upright and gagged, yanking his mask off and pressing a hand over his mouth. A bucket was shoved in his face and he made use of it while hands dragged him out of the operating theatre and into the hall. He didn't take his head out again for what seemed like a long time though he brought up nothing worse than bile and mucus, having not had much of an appetite in the last few days.

"Stench get to you?" one of the other white coats asked. Karl nodded, glad to have an excuse provided for him.

"It will do that," the man went on. "You'd better take care of yourself, Shorty. Don't want you falling ill on us. Mengele might be coming to visit next month." He'd smiled, but it had been that of a snake. Karl shivered with the coldest chill yet to freeze his insides. He had to get out of here.

"And you wished to be transferred back to a field unit?"

"I do."

The director frowned thoughtfully. "But why? You've proven yourself an excellent physician. You have been very useful here."

Karl had his doubts about that.

"I am not sure I am being as useful as I could be. Few of the experiments are successful and it pains me that we have made so little progress. I feel I would be better employed where I could make full use of my talents."

"I have asked you again and again to join the surgical staff."

Karl inwardly cringed. "And I am flattered by you generous offers. However, my strength lies in putting people back together, not in taking them apart. I could better serve the Reich keeping its soldiers alive."

The director thought about that and nodded. "You may have a point. I will put in the request for your transfer."

As it was, there was no paperwork to process, much to the bafflement of the i _Buchenwald_ /i clerical staff. Since Karl's impressment had been at gunpoint, he had no official records of either joining willingly or being drafted by the German army. Not waiting to see if his request would be turned down or not, Karl brushed off his fatigues and kit and left with the first unit that came through. The director assumed the paperwork had been processed, the clerical staff had no desire to raise a stink, and consequently nothing was said about it. So it was that Karl escaped the frozen pit of hell where the devil's own breath rose in black clouds from flames fed by the bodies of God's people.

The mines and shells and bullets flying overhead were a welcome respite from the insanity. At least this chaos made sense. He marched with a different unit than the one that had brought him under the grim, concrete eaves of i _Buchenwald_ /i . Still, they thought of him as sub-human and treated him as such until they discovered he was a necessity. He didn't care. Insults and curses bounced off him harmlessly and he shrugged off the kicks, trips and intentional shoves. It wasn't worth rising to their provocations. They were only trying to goad him into giving an excuse to do him real harm. He never gave it to them. In its own way, it was a small and bitter victory that he savored to himself.

They laid off a bit as things got grimmer for the German forces. They'd been routed by French and American troops several times already. It was obvious wherever they went that the allies were on their way. Because of that, Karl's group became more desperate. Prisoners were not taken, no witnesses left behind, not even civilians. Entire villages were massacred for the sake of neutralizing one enemy soldier or spy. Karl was not allowed to treat the injured. Instead they hauled him off to the next destination, leaving the wounded to bleed. Karl's own heart bled in sympathy, agonized that he could not help them.

The rules of war thus thrown out the window, Karl began looking forward to the day that he might be shot. He was playing for the wrong team though he had not volunteered, but the Allies would not know that. Karl would have given anything to trade sides but imagined it was far too late. He'd done too much. If they put a bullet through his brain he would have deserved no less than that and would have been thankful for it. He'd had enough. It was therefore something of a surprise when faced with just such an instance that he felt no bite of lead but instead the removal of the cold press of steel as the rifle barrel was lowered away from his temples.

"… i _Karl_ /i ?"

Lifting his eyes and lowering his hands, Karl could only gawk stupidly. It was Julian.

He burst into tears.


End file.
